Social media plays a larger and larger role in our lives; increasingly, members of our society interact with family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances on-line via web browsers, mobile applications (from their smartphones, tablet computers, or similar devices), or other means. Many very successful web sites and services exist to facilitate this on-line interaction, including FACEBOOK, TWITTER, FOURSQUARE, VINE, and many others. Many of us use these services and value the virtual friendships that they allow.
These on-line services, however, at best do not help real-world interactions between people, and may in fact hider them. Increasingly, we retreat to our on-line personas and shrink away from real-world interaction. An older generation may, perhaps, have developed the social skills, confidence, and assuredness to (for example) walk into a room full of strangers and be at ease; they may have the social confidence to approach, speak to, or otherwise engage new people. Younger people, on the other hand, may have never known life without social media, and without its support, may struggle in traditional, in-person, real-world interactions with others.
Social media is here to stay. Efforts to withdraw from it, or eliminate it, are futile; those who wish for the end of social media as a means to cultivate traditional, in-person interaction will fail. A need therefore exists for a way to cultivate and facilitate real-world, in-person interaction that embraces and leverages existing paradigms of social media.